The extreme lengths parents go to in the natural world, according to Sir David Attenborough

Telegraph

26-07-2025

The parents' story in the natural world has often been overshadowed by the cute and adorable offspring they produce. Yet, if you look a little deeper, the true revelations, drama and intriguing science lies with those with the ultimate responsibility – the parents.
Over the course of three years, our teams found a deep well of fascinating new stories to be told about animal parenting. It took us to 23 countries across six continents, from the remote forests of Bhutan, to the gorgeous heathlands of Devon, to the wide open grasslands of Botswana.
It is a subject matter that requires the very highest standards of wildlife filmmaking – rigorous science, meticulous planning, ingenious cinematography, and experienced field craft – as we set out to capture the extremely sensitive and private relationships between parents and offspring.
And, of course, when all of that is in place, a passion for the serendipitous magic that the natural world can throw up at any moment.
The resulting footage was astounding, both in the dramatic stakes of the parenting journey, but also the new insights into behaviour that our teams across the world captured. Most surprising of all, though, was recognising many of the same dilemmas that we, as parents ourselves, have to deal with on a daily basis.
Are we providing enough food? Is the home environment we build good enough? How can so much excrement come out of such a small body? (Amazingly, Swamp Canary chicks pre-package their poo into bags for their parents to remove from the nest.) And how do we prepare our offspring for an unpredictable future?
As ever, there are important lessons to be found in the world around us, if you look hard enough.
When we asked Sir David Attenborough to lend his expertise and guiding voice to our series, he was delighted to be involved, having worked closely with us at Silverback Films on previous series for the BBC, The Hunt and The Mating Game.
As always, his storytelling guidance, his knowledge of the natural world and his unique turn of phrase brought our footage to life, and his delivery of our revelatory story on spider matriphagy – in which a spider mother makes the ultimate commitment by sacrificing herself to her hungry spiderlings – is perhaps the best I've heard in the 25 years I've been working with him.
And we didn't need to scrimp on the cute and adorable offspring after all. They just became supporting characters to the real masters of life's destiny: the parents.
The animal kingdom guide to parenting
San Joaquin kit fox
A mother San Joaquin kit fox has an incredibly tough job – in the grasslands of California, she has to be both a tireless provider of food and a vigilant protector of her boisterous and growing kits.
Her highly developed sense of hearing and smell help keep her aware of her environment, but in the year we filmed there, unusually heavy rains made her desert home into a sea of grass – and for an animal the size of a house cat, that makes parenting especially difficult.
As soon as darkness fell, predatory coyotes were drawn in by the sound of her young, and the mother was left with a dilemma – continue to hunt kangaroo rats to keep her babies well fed, or stand guard by their den and keep them all safe.
We were able to capture the unfolding drama using highly specialised military-grade heat-sensitive cameras.
Western lowland gorilla
The team were reliant on the expertise of Gabonese trackers working as part of a long-term study for the Max Planck Institute to get up close and personal with these incredibly special apes.
We wanted to tell the story behind the choices a mother gorilla makes once she has raised her offspring to the point where they can survive on their own – in that two to three years, her situation may well have changed.
The current dominant silverback of the group may well not be the best choice as a father for her future offspring and to assess this, she scrutinises his health, his territory, and his ability to provide protection.
If he doesn't meet the criteria, she may well ditch him for a better option. It is an oft overlooked part of the parenthood story in the natural world, and our expert team worked hard to gain the gorillas ' confidence to illustrate their lives.
African elephant
Elephant matriarchs are well known for their incredible parenting knowledge, developed over many years – there isn't much a mature elephant female hasn't seen or known how to solve.
However, during our filming time in Samburu, Kenya, an extended drought was forcing the elephants there to share the limited water with the people living nearby, who were also under pressure from the drought.
As if that resource sharing wasn't stressful enough, these droughts have often been followed by unpredictably heavy rainfalls resulting in flash floods.
It leaves even the most experienced elephant mothers with some tough choices – how do you provide your family with enough water, and how do you know when to treat that same water with caution, as it has the power to sweep a young elephant calf away?
Amazonian tapir
In order to prepare her offspring for independence, a mother tapir has to show them all the available resources they will need to survive.
On top of the countless plant species that make up their diet, she must also lead her calf to the clay licks [where animals gather to eat] located within their rainforest home. The clay helps offset the toxins within many rainforest plants, and it will be vital for the calf to know where and how to find them.
Our team worked with a fantastic Brazilian camera team to stake out these clay licks with thermal cameras and a network of camera traps to capture the special moments when a mother leads her calf to this life-giving remedy.
Orangutan
Orangutans invest a huge amount of time into preparing their young for independence – almost a decade.
Where we filmed, deep in the jungles of Borneo, the abundance and whereabouts of the best food changes year on year, and a mother orangutan must teach her young where and how to find it.
And it's not just food, but know-how too – and to see a young orangutan learning how to make his own bed by copying his mother has to be one of the highlights of the series.
The mother selects larger sticks to build a stable mattress, and smaller sticks to form the rim; she even chooses leafier branches for the pillow, and she does this every day.
Pheasant-tailed jacana
Often in wildlife filming the story you come home with is more interesting than the story you set out to film.
In Thailand, we knew the parental commitment shown by pheasant-tailed jacana fathers was a good story – but what we hadn't expected, and what the jacanas we were filming certainly hadn't prepared for, was a caterpillar infestation that devastated the lilly pads that the jacanas needed to raise and protect their young chicks.
What started as a simple story about the complexity of raising a family who can't swim or fly on the surface of a lake, turned into a Cormac McCarthy -esque epic journey out of the aftermath of Armageddon to find a suitable home for the family.
We have a mantra – always be open-eyed to the serendipity of the natural world – and there are dramas even the best planned script could never predict.
African social spider
This story, which has never been filmed before in full, has to be one of the most extraordinary examples of animal behaviour I've ever seen.
African social spiders live in large sprawling nests of up to 50 adult sisters, who hunt together within the nests, emerging en masse to engulf prey insects that become trapped.
Each female will lay up to 50 eggs, and when the eggs hatch, the mother spider begins to feed her spiderlings with regurgitated 'milk' made from decomposing her own insides.
As the spiderlings grow in size, they become more and more voracious and soon become large enough to take on solid prey. Within a few weeks however, between the resident sisters there are too many spiderlings, and not enough food to go around.
This is when their mothers do something extraordinary – their movements become more and more laboured, and their struggling appears to mimic the vibration of a distressed prey insect.
These vibrations are picked up by their own spiderlings, who descend on their mother's dinner table one last time – only this time, their mother is the main course.
To witness this sacrifice on location in Namibia, and to work out how to film it, was one of the most extraordinary challenges I've come across in 25 years of making wildlife films.
Burrowing owl
Quite possibly the most charming bird on the planet, burrowing owl parents work around the clock for the brood.
They first scout a suitable home underground (hence their name) to lay their eggs and, once agreed upon, they form a formidable team to first incubate and then feed their chicks over the course of several weeks.
It's a 24-hour job, and the larger the chicks become, the harder work it is to find enough snacks to keep them satisfied – what parent doesn't recognise that pressure?
As they spend longer and longer away from the burrow, their chicks become exposed to predation pressure, and we witnessed and filmed wily road runners constantly trying to find opportunities to grab young owl chicks.
Ingeniously, the chicks have evolved an alarm response to intruders that sounds exactly like the warning rattle of a rattlesnake. Its effective for most mammals – in this case, however, rattlesnakes are one of the preferred prey of the road runner, which further endangers the chicks!
Cheetah
Cheetahs, though extraordinary predators, have a lot to contend with as parents. As one of the smaller cats in the Maasai Mara, their kittens are extremely exposed to larger predators like lions and hyenas, so their mother is in a race against time to feed them up to get them large enough to fend for themselves.
Harder still is to expose them to the correct hunting techniques and situations so they can learn through their own mistakes. In the time we spent with this fantastic cheetah mother, one could feel the pressure and frustration at trying to get her teenage kittens to become better hunters.
Remarkably, she provided them a young Thompson's gazelle for practice – a low-risk prey item on which to literally cut their teeth. It's an extraordinary parental commitment to witness.
Banggai cardinalfish
One for the fathers out there – left to fend for his fertilised eggs brood, a Banggai cardinalfish father decided the best way to look after his precious cargo is to house them inside his mouth.
This 'mouth brooding' father keeps them safe until they hatch within his mouth, at which point he then needs to deposit them in a safe part of their reef ecosystem – one which has few predators, plenty of cover, and little competition.
It's no easy job, as a busy reef is dangerous for both him and his fry.
Potter wasp
No internationally filmed major wildlife series would be complete without an extraordinary British species whose behaviour is equally deserved of celebration – and the potter wasp is no exception.
Filmed on the heathlands of Devon with the help of an equally fantastic scientist John Walters, the sequence shows the exceptional devotion and skill that a female potter wasp undergoes to first craft a clay pot for her single egg, before stuffing it full of juicy caterpillars – a larder for her unborn offspring.
Over the course of a few weeks, she builds up to 25 of these pots, each a loving commitment to her future young.
It's her life's work. She will die before her young emerge from their mother's pot the following spring. It's an extraordinarily beautiful sequence.